Messages

76

XPiratez / Re: Codex Popularity Poll

« on: February 09, 2021, 07:06:48 am »

I was WONDERING what happened to the chainmail I was supposed to get, and where the Aggressors came from. They were handy for those missions where you're not allowed to wear the "obvious" armors, although I was usually flying Grav Harnesses at that point since I rushed to get those. And as those come with no armor and your team's armor is only as good as the worst armor on the attacking force, especially since any slower armor becomes totally irrelevant as those guys will never make it to the fight...the only real use of heavy armor is soaking reaction spam in the initial LZ, and for that, the armor must be HEAVY, so I usually use a car or tank.

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XPiratez / Re: ?Peasants are Superior?: A stupid playthrough

« on: February 09, 2021, 07:02:39 am »

The one thing I've found when spamming peasants or SS is that spear infantry OP. Spear attack trains melee, so your peasants gain melee skill, but the attack is treated as a ranged weapon so bypasses enemy evasion, and has a 150% base accuracy.

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XPiratez / Re: A thread for little questions

« on: February 09, 2021, 06:52:26 am »

I find that something about the way I build bases confuses the enemy AI and they just kinda chill out in the hangar bays, too timid to actually advance, leaving only a few stragglers to get stuck in the tunnels somewhere and have to be hunted down with Aye-Phones. Earlier I got raided by mercenaries while my interceptors were out, and I waited like 3 turns for them to actually advance and attack me while I gathered all the random people standing around...and...nothing. Not a single man poked his head out into the corridors. They were all just huddled in the hangar bay.

One guy killed them all with a bloodaxe.

Seriously. Blood Axe. Those things DESTROY mercenaries. You can chop down a merc in one or two hits gaining more TU than it cost to destroy them because they're utterly soft against that damage type, so once the chain reaction starts, it doesn't stop until stimpacking medics can no longer reach the axeman or everyone is dead.

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XPiratez / Re: A thread for little questions

« on: February 09, 2021, 03:08:54 am »

Ninjas can steal some sizeable chunk of your surplus wealth, but as far as I know, won't actually drive you into bankruptcy, just prune off money if you have too much of it.

Demonic Incursions are objects that explode and kill everyone near them while spawning Imps during a base defense. Their negative sell cost makes them basically impossible to get rid of short of shipping them to a base and then destroying the entire base. I advise not producing those anymore, there's nothing you can obtain from that which is worth this level of hassle.

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XPiratez / Re: A thread for little questions

« on: February 08, 2021, 05:01:53 pm »

Every floor adds to calculations even if it contains empty tiles. Those empty tiles still count even if there's nothing to render. Engine bug which original xcom also shared.

Yup, that's what I'm saying, yes. Combined with the long lines of sight effectively to infinity because there are no walls, floors, or other obstacles to block them, and you get every line traced to the end of the map.

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XPiratez / Re: A thread for little questions

« on: February 07, 2021, 11:20:45 pm »

I'm guessing it's because the space map has no real floor. It's just this completely open map, so when it tries to do personal lighting calculations, it tries to project the light down to the floor...which is all the way "down".

Also, despite it being zero-gravity, bodies of killed opponents and objects immediately plummet to the bottom of the map.

Perhaps the open portions should be filled with invisible "elevator" instead, so the ability to fly and shoot through it is retained, but the behavior of all dropped objects falling to the bottom is suppressed.

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XPiratez / Re: ?Peasants are Superior?: A stupid playthrough

« on: February 07, 2021, 11:17:01 pm »

It's only "not that bad" in a very relative sense. While probably the best available general-purpose armor for Peasants, it's still heavy and -5 TU, cannot fly, has minimal armor value, and while it has decent chunk of purple shielding, remember: Purple Shields are weak vs. basically everything. Whereas Blitz's blue 77/10 is effectively 308/40 vs the most common and most unavoidable damage types (piercing and concussion respectively), and provides protection vs. pretty much every major threat profile, even if it is weak vs. lazor, Purple provides only lousy protection vs. every major threat profile except lazor, against which it is totally useless, as well as Stabbing. Unfortunately, Lazor is probably the second most common damage type, and Stabbing is probably the 4th most common behind Plasma (but all shields are bad at plasma).

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XPiratez / Re: ?Peasants are Superior?: A stupid playthrough

« on: February 07, 2021, 11:35:18 am »

The main thing which holds back peasants is their lack of any useful armor options until SAINT. Everything else is either non-flying, non-armoring, and/or saddled with crap gold or purple shields. Of course, SAINT has entirely fused weapon slots, but at least it flies, has TU out the wazoo, and blue shield, which is probably the best shield type in the game due to its broadband coverage and effectivity against the most common threat profiles.

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XPiratez / Re: Bugs & Crash Reports

« on: February 05, 2021, 09:16:59 pm »

Strikes on Jack Sparrow difficulty are indeed punitive BS. But so is the whole setting at that point. Clown car ships(escorts with 6+ terror units), bonkers enemy stat buffs, ect.

I think the key to winning on Jack Sparrow is the Blood Axe and its ilk: It's a weapon which effectively scales to the enemy's stats, since the more HP they have, the more TU you can get out of them when you whack them with it. At a certain point, you hit a breakpoint and unlock Infinite Killing Spree. I just mowed through an entire Merc ship of like 30-40 guys on turn 1 that way, every Merc you introduce to the sharp blade of your axe gives back more TU than it cost to do this, the rampage only stopping when you run out of enemies you can reach. Because of the sheer number of enemies and their increased HP that JS gives you, it sets off chain reaction where you just bounce from enemy to enemy refilling your TUs as you slay them, periodically chugging your canteen or being stimpacked by medics to not pass out.

Guns, in contrast, scale very badly to this, because no matter how many TUs you have, you can only fire so many shots, and if it takes that many more extra shots to kill, your stopping power plummets like a rock. But TU-refunding melee doesn't care how many HPs the enemy has, the more the merrier.

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XPiratez / Re: A thread for little questions

« on: February 05, 2021, 10:20:20 am »

That little bunker thing triggered a rant in my IRC about "people who put fortifications in games don't understand fortifications". That "bunker" is basically a mess of blind spots and obstructed lines of fire that end up hampering YOU more than the enemy. Pretty much one of the things I do very early on is just to rip the thing apart and hack gunports, passages, and generally explode the place.

Also, for some reason, what appears to be a missile silo in it cannot actually ever fire any of the missiles because there is no way for the missiles to actually launch as it is on the lower floor and there's an entire other floor above it as well as a solid roof. It explodes real nice when I'm remodelling the place, though.

But then I discovered Bombard. The Fort is still terribly designed, but when it's not quite bad enough to stop you from just gassing the entire map. The first time I fired that thing, the game straight up froze briefly and I thought it was about to crash...and then the shrieking started. So much dying. Instantly got like 40 kills in one shot.

And get this: IT HAS 3 MORE ROUNDS. Jesus Christ. With the slow speed of the projectile animation and the YUGE EXPLOSION, it really felt less like a "Bombard" and more like NUCLEAR LAUNCH DETECTED.

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XPiratez / Re: Codex Popularity Poll

« on: February 05, 2021, 10:10:17 am »

Well, fast transport is just about catching landed ufos.  At 1800 speed based in europe you can hit a landed ufo basically anywhere on the globe before it gets back up except maybe australia and lower south america, shadowbat is basically the same speed.  A turtle in europe OTOH can only hit europe, and some of asia and africa.

If you really want to chase landed UFOs, on the rare instances they actually do, instead of just overflying their alleged destination and not landing, you could just chase after them until they do, I suppose. I take more of a direct approach of things: If I can't MAKE a thing I want happen, then it's not happening, and if I can't stop a thing that I don't want from happening, then it will happen. Either you force the outcome or you deal with the results, because you're going to have to, either way, and at that point it is considered a solved problem and warrants no further attention.

It is optional, but adds quite a lot of money:  selling the engine, slave AIs, and hellerium nets around 1 million for one mission and you can occasionally get half a dozen of these a month even as early as february.  When that doesn't sound like much money, the cutters are the only source of scanners before x-prison, which is hard as hell with all the melee/freshness changes.

I didn't actually find the X-Prison that hard. If anything, it was about as, if not easier, than the typical mission, probably because I already melee everything anyway, so an environment in which enemies lack much in the way of ranged weaponry actually makes the process easier. Since this is already my style, it didn't represent any real change in how I operate.

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XPiratez / Re: Bugs & Crash Reports

« on: February 04, 2021, 05:32:34 pm »

Most sea armors let you 'fly' underwater, there are only a few exceptions and it's because they're either heavy armor or syns.  I thought it'd be common sense that you can fly underwater to simulate swimming, then I remembered that the makers of TFTD didn't think so either.

But in TFTD, all your guys are wearing Looter (Sea), and thus cannot "fly".

Abit like the Space Freighter, after I stunlevel'd everyone I noticed just how nasty some of those critters might've been... I actually might not have been able to handle those Droids and even with boom guns im not sure if the Ship Officers could be taken down (red shields). There were bodyguard armor parts there but the only other benefit was a Damaged Syn on the ship.

The Space Freighter is described to be more of a smash-and-grab, you're not actually expected to fight your way through the entire ship. You can get Orbs from this, though.

Red Shields are actually way easier to deal with than Blue Shields, because they have much lower resistance to the heavy damage types you can throw at them. In fact, since they provide no defense whatsoever against Mind, I just neutral-whip everyone senseless, which I was going to do anyway, so as far as my playstyle is concerned, Red Shields basically don't exist.

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XPiratez / Re: A thread for little questions

« on: February 04, 2021, 05:29:31 pm »

The Bombard is getting abit old in the tooth though, its an easy Mortar, but it can fire Every Turn and thats whats special about it. Even Servo Mortar is every other turn, and I trashed my Tornado Mortar because its too heavy (Burst fire doesn't work either, after the first its unable to get an arc for the remaining shots).

The first time I used the Bombard was on that Deep One Fort Assault mission. It obliterated like half the map in one shot. So much gas. Beautiful. I bring it along any time I'm on a mission where unrestricted lethal force is allowed.

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XPiratez / Re: Codex Popularity Poll

« on: February 04, 2021, 05:17:21 pm »

I'd definitely prefer a shadowbat, BUT it does get an aux slot, so you don't have to buy a pachyderm if you want to bring an armored car on a fast ship.

At a mere 1800 speed, I can only call it a "fast" ship by putting fast in sarcastic quotes. Speed on a transport isn't really the most critical thing, though. Majority of missions don't despawn if anything is heading towards it.

The turtle also doesn't get a decent radar so it gets blown up by HKs early game.

This trick may blow your mind: Fighter Escort. When you send an unarmed transport, also launch your interceptors and tell them to follow it. This is one of your rare opportunities to shoot down anything that isn't a civilian, since if they wanna come fight you, you will no longer need 5K+ speed just to catch them. This is pretty much the only use all those sub-5K fighters even have, since there's no way for them to catch anything. Slapping a few shadowshields on your Turtle, seeing as it has all those STC slots, will make it awfully tanky.

Otherwise, it doesn't matter if you have a decent radar or not: Everything is faster than you anyway, so a better radar just means you get more time to scream in panic before you die.

That said, the worm is such a troll ship if you've ever played with it, it'll definitely get a gal or two killed from accidentally gas triggers.

Well, if I'm running the Fast Action Response Team, my team is immune to gas anyway, since I'm constantly emitting it.

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XPiratez / Re: Base Defense Facility Simulator (missiles/battleships/crackdowns, etc)

« on: February 04, 2021, 05:05:06 pm »

I don't even bother with radars. At that point in the game, I have no ability to intercept anything anyway, so I don't need to see it, it just interrupts gameflow. It isn't really until you get Nightmares that you can actually intercept anything at all that isn't immediately in your face or will actively pursue you, and even then, most things aren't interceptable until Sabres, so there's little point in even trying, as most enemies clock in around 5K+ speed, so even Nightmares can't effectively close with them unless they're already very near you and nothing else should even bother trying.